Be the first team to land a spacecraft on the Moon, travel at least 500 meters, transmit HD images and video back to Earth, and you’ve won yourself $20 million. Oh, and you also have to do this 90%-funded by private investment and do it by the end of 2017. That’s the mission for the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

The XPRIZE is the name of various competitions organized by the non-profit XPRIZE Foundation.The XPRIZE mission is to bring about “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity” through incentivized competition. We foster high‐profile competitions that motivate individuals, companies and organizations across all disciplines to develop innovative ideas and technologies that help solve the grand challenges that restrict humanity’s progress.One of the most famous XPRIZE competitions was the Ansari XPrize. In 2004, Mojave Aerospace Ventures took that $10 million prize with their SpaceShipOne, after they became the first team to “build a reliable, reusable, privately financed, manned spaceship capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface twice within two weeks”. The prize was a major step forward for the development of a private space industry. A few other XPRIZEs have included developing super-efficient automobiles, solutions for cleaning ...